No Left Turns

Snow State of Nature in DC?

If you clear snow for a parking space at your apartment complex, do you have a right to it? Even in socialistic DC, residents seem to demand Lockean justice: labor creates a title to ownership--but for how long? And what about the obligation to clear streets in front of a shop? In front of your house, where you have been holed up for days? Does Tocquevillean self-interest properly understood help us here?

In the California gold rush, such common-sense rules prevailed on staking claims. I am not a "spontaneous order" libertarian, but human nature does point us in a certain direction. Perhaps the snows may teach the Obama Administration a lesson: it's the pitchfork attempting to drive out nature, even more than the peasants with the pitchforks, whose lesson they should heed.

Discussions - 14 Comments

Sick and tired

Really, Ken? Using the weather in DC as a way of "arguing" against the current administration?

I think this might be the post with which nlt stopped even the smallest pretense of being a genuine forum for informed debate and showed itself for what it's really become: a place where the disenfranchised and lunatic right can go to make each other feel better.

"Sick and tired" - they say "laughter is the best medicine", or as the Bible says: "A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones." (Proverbs 17:22) Too bad you liberals lost your senses of humor a long time ago.

Let's make "Sick and tired" a little sicker. After the Obama inauguration, the National Mall looked like a garbage dump: tons of paper, bottles, food wrappers, placards, etc., that took weeks to clean up.

After the September 12 Tea Party rally on the Mall (estimated crowd: 300K-500K), there was no litter at all. Why did the collective behavior of two huge crowds differ so dramatically?

The Obama supporters were largely a “let government do it for us” crowd. Their behavior reflected little sympathy for the virtue of personal responsibility.

The Tea Party crowd was exactly the opposite in those respects. Their explicit reason for protesting was the “let government do it” mentality that was then, and is now, spending our nation into penury. They were their to call for the restoration of personal responsibility in public policy.

Washington under Obama is indeed a socialistic city. I would wager that those willing to grab a parking space shoveled out by someone else would be from the “let someone else do it” crowd. Those who would protest such poaching are most likely like those who picked up after themselves on the Mall.

Michelle, do you have even one scintilla of evidence to back up your claim in which you contrasted the littering Obama inauguration crowd versus the tidy, non-littering Tea Partiers? Anything other than a badly photoshopped side-by-side from Drudge or someone's rant on FreeRepublic (or Stormfront) will do just fine.

Craig Scanlon says: "Michelle, do you have even one scintilla of evidence to back up your claim in which you contrasted the littering Obama inauguration crowd versus the tidy, non-littering Tea Partiers?"

When you have crowds that large, the massive litter in the one case and the absence of litter in the other is itself evidence of a significant, pervasive difference in the crowds' respective attitudes about littering. (The litter after the Inauguration wasn't Photoshopped, by the way. It was all too real.)

(So, I can believe you were at Glenn Beck's DC tea party, but were you also at the Obama inauguration?)"

No, that was a short -winded way of naming my evidence: The litter in one case, the absence of litter in the other.

I saw the Mall immediately after both occasions. It's a short walk from my home. If you can explain the difference without referring to participants' attitudes about littering, you can stop evading my question and answer it now.

Michelle - You live in DC? Oh now, why should we trust one of you elitist Beltway insider types??

(Anyway, my cousin Fred drove his pickup truck past the mall immediately after both events and actually reported the exact opposite - and he lives in Real, Heartland America, where the good, honest, hard-working folks (like those of Winesburg, Ohio, for example) can be trusted to tell it like it is!)

Thanks for that reply, Craig. I now have you on my shit-for-brains list, which is obviously your taxonomic home. My last syllable in reply to anything you might post on any conceivable topic in the future his: this.

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